In the merchandising of soft drinks and other beverages, it is often quite desirable to provide promotional programs such as riddles, humorous cartoons, and games for a purchaser's amusement subject to the purchase of a beverage or the like in a disposable cup or container.
One particularly interesting and popular form of amusement is the participation of the customer in a card game or the like wherein a hand of a particularly well known card game, such as poker, is printed in various permutations and combinations on a run of cups so that some competitive amusement between purchasers or perhaps some premium arrangement with the establishment can be achieved by comparison of the strength of the hand on a given cup with those of other purchasers or a standard of the establishment.
The present invention relates to the printing of poker hands on two-piece frustoconical drinking cups and the like which include a sidewall adapted to be printed in sequence on a strip of stock and a bottom portion which is printed on a separate strip of stock but which may be indexed with and applied to respective sidewalls in a conventional cup-making machine of any desirable type.
The sidewalls of conventional paper cups are printed on paper strip stock or paperboard in a basically arcuate configuration in which the outboard edges are ultimately overlapped when the sidewall is blanked from the stock to form a side seam and a bottom curl is utilized to retain a bottom disc within the lowermost portion of the sidewall.
Assuming that a five card poker hand is the desired end result of the imprint to be made on a given cup, four of the cards should be determinable from looking at the sidewall and a draw card or hole card, being a term of art in the game of poker, is visible from observing the exterior of the bottom disc placed in the cup.
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to provide a new and novel method and apparatus and resulting drinking cup or the like having a maximized number of permutations and combinations of poker hands formed thereon for a given printing run of sidewall and bottom stock.
Other objects of the present invention will become more fully apparent with respect to the following specification and drawings which relate to a preferred embodiment of the present invention.